About me

My story

When I was 10, my parents gave me a sewing machine for Christmas. I exchanged it for a typewriter. That same year, I started taking the bus across town to Milwaukee’s largest library because I’d read “all the books” at my neighborhood branch.

Later, lured by the promise of getting paid to ask questions and write about the answers, I got my first journalism job at a newspaper in Phoenix. What followed was more than a dozen years with The Associated Press in Columbia, S.C., San Francisco and Iraq where I helped coax stories out of other writers as well as cultivate my own.

I've earned a living my entire adult life through writing and editing. Only half-joking, I often say "thank goodness, because that's all I know how to do!" 

I'm passionate about putting together words. As a freelance writer, editor and book doctor, I delight in “pruning the tree” to help tell the stories found in lives well-lived.